


Operation: Odin's Eye

by TigerLilyNoh



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Angst, F/M, Men of Letters, Protective Dean Winchester, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester on Demon Blood, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Telekinesis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-18 02:01:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14202603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerLilyNoh/pseuds/TigerLilyNoh
Summary: Sam used to have a bright future ahead of him as a Man of Letters, until the visions started.  Six years later, Sam’s life as a psychic working for the Men of Letters was about as far as it got from the happy life he’d dreamed of.  Not only did he have to struggle with his status as a psychic, but Sam was more powerful that the Men of Letters knew.  Dean liked to say that at least their shitty circumstances made their priorities simple: Don’t get caught.  Don’t get killed.But of course, nothing was ever simple when it came to psychics.





	Operation: Odin's Eye

“It was over there.”  Sam pointed toward a large brick building with unlit windows, then gestured to a freestanding sign advertising some mega-church.  “That’s definitely the billboard I saw.”

Dean pulled over and parked the Impala about a block away from the brick building's side.  It was shortly after midnight and in an industrial neighborhood of Kansas City, where they’d been working out of that month.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky to obstruct the light of the full moon that might illuminate their approach.

“How many did you see?” Dean asked while assessing the terrain.

“Three men, one woman—armed with blades and moving like angels.”

Dean sighed at the unpleasant prospect of fighting four angels.  They were used to being outnumbered, but angels were an extra pain in the ass.  He picked up his cell phone and reluctantly called it in.

“This is Dean Campbell and Sam Winchester.  We’ve got a possible lead on an Akor’al relic at—“  Dean leaned forward to read the address on the nearby building “—742 Greystone Way.  Yeah, north of there.”

Sam opened the glove box and double-checked their angel blades while waiting for his brother to finish the call.  Dean rolled his eyes at something the person on the other end of the line said.

“No, I don’t have eyes on it,” Dean replied, then listened to the other person for a moment before responding.  “Because Sam’s a fucking psychic and we IDed the location from his vision.” Dean covered the microphone on his cell, then spoke to Sam.  “I can’t tell if these assholes never read your file or if they just get off on making me say it. I can’t believe you wanted to be a Letters.”

“That was a long time ago.”  

Sam frowned a bit at the memory of being expelled from training as a Man of Letters.  He’d been one of the rare few hunters to stand a chance at transitioning to being a Letters, but in his last year of training, when he was twenty-two, the visions had started.  One of the early ones had knocked him out during a lecture on handling magical artifacts. He’d spent three weeks in a Letters infirmary under lock and key until they’d run enough experiments on him to decide that he was more asset than threat.  

Dean had more or less rioted at the news that his brother was being held as a potential prisoner.  He’d immediately travelled cross-country to visit the base that Sam had been stuck in and tried every method of bribery and harassment he could think of to get inside.  Of course nothing had worked, though he'd thankfully stopped short of resorting to force. Hunters rarely had any real influence over Letters, but the brothers were given the smallest measure of mercy.  After all, Dean had always been a hunter who'd consistently produced results for nearly eight years. Anyway, aside from Sam’s new condition, he’d been top of his class all throughout training.

Once Sam was diagnosed, he’d been thrown straight into his new reality.  His status was entered into the system and his identity was marred. He was no longer qualified for a position as a Man of Letters; he’d barely be considered a hunter despite falling back into his old position.  It was a harsh learning process made worse by the ignorance and fear surrounding psychics.

Nobody liked working with psychics.  They were bad luck. They acted weird.  The moment they set foot onto a Letters-hunters’ base the whole mood changed.  In most countries the military and police wouldn’t even let them join the normal ranks; they were too unstable of an element.  Nearly everyone agreed that they were best used by putting them in a padded room with a dictation device to catch their thoughts.  

There were a few exceptions though.  Two dozen psychics had been approved for field work as hunters by the Letters in a pilot program.  Operation: Odin’s Eye was somebody’s pipe dream if Sam had ever heard of one, but he wasn’t about to look a gift-horse in the mouth.  The hope was that the program’s psychics could incorporate the visions into their hunting. In real time the psychic could verify their vision and engage with it.

There were problems of course.  It was incredibly rare that a normal hunter was comfortable working with one.  Psychics were very nearly the things they hunted and occasionally that caused a few drunken fights over loyalty.  Of course, Sam didn’t have trouble finding a partner.

“You’re too good for the Letters—that’s why they put you in the field,” Dean offered, then uncovered the mic on his phone and turned his attention back to the call.  “Listen, just tell me whether we’re waiting on back up.”

“They aren’t gonna give us any backup,” Sam muttered, then quickly clarified, “Speculating.”

“Yeah, I hear you.”  Dean tapped his finger to his nose to indicate that Sam’s guess was correct.

After Dean hung up, they grabbed their angel blades and a set of Enochian brass knuckles, then started making their way down the alley leading to the building’s back door.  Halfway down the corridor Sam held his arm out in front of Dean, wordlessly stopping them both. They stood there, perfectly still, for seven seconds before Sam gestured for them to continue past a set of grimy windows.  When they got to the warehouse door Sam leaned in close to whisper in his brother’s ear.

“There’s gonna be a fight.  The short one is gonna pop in behind you after the woman swings at your chest.”

“Do we win?” Dean asked softly with a grin.

Sam flipped him off then started counting down from three with his fingers before kicking in the door.

Dean ran in with the confidence of a trained killer who’d just been told how he was going to be ambushed.  But beyond whatever assurance the intel gave him, Sam suspected that he was also motivated to keep himself between Sam and danger.  Granted, with angels danger could come from any direction.

Sam dodged the blade of a charging angel, then parried a second attack as he checked on Dean from the corner of his eye.  Dean was already fighting two angels at once, blade in his offhand while landing a punch with his Enochian-brass-knuckle-adorned main hand.  

The use of such an insulting weapon as the brass knuckles drew the attention of a red-haired angel, who made a break for Dean.  Sam swept the legs out from under first angel to temporarily immobilize him, then hurried to block the redhead. He tried to stab the angel, but was met with a parry and a sudden counterattack.  Sam dodged the counterattack, then lunged forward to strike, but the red-haired angel disappeared. He tried to regain his footing, but the first angel he’d been fighting sliced at him in his vulnerable position.  Sam slipped and fell backwards onto a workbench as he evaded a hit. When the angel tried to stab him, he rolled to the side at the same moment that he swung upwards, cutting the angel’s throat. The sudden motion made Sam roll off the table and fall to the ground.  

He looked to his brother just in time to see the female angel take a horizontal slice at Dean’s chest as the shorter angel appeared behind him.  Recognizing his cue, Dean grabbed the woman’s forearm as she swung her blade at him, then grasped her opposite shoulder and spun around, shoving her into the stout angel’s blade.  A solid punch to the short angel’s surprised face, followed by a quick stab to his chest left the room clear of angels. Sam was just about to warn Dean that there was still one angel at large, but he didn’t get that chance.

The red-haired angel appeared behind Dean and immediately moved to stab him.  Dean tried to block, but he was a second too slow. The angel's body jerked backwards several inches.  A few of its bones audibly snapped as it was forced into a morbidly frozen spectacle. Dean stared at the angel in shock for a second before finishing it off.  Light shown from the angel’s mouth and eyes before the body collapsed to the floor, marking it with charcoal wings. But neither brother bothered to watch. Sam was sitting on the floor, head hung with shame, and Dean was looking anywhere but at Sam or the mess in front of them.

“Fucking hell!” Dean shouted in frustration.  He paced in a circle trying to force some calm into himself, then stopped and lowered his voice.  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled.”

“It was an accident,” Sam said quietly.

“Sam, if you slip up and someone sees….”  Dean chewed his lower lip in an anxious tell.

“I know.”

“It’s bad enough that they know you’re a psychic.  If they find out about the other stuff—”

“I fucking know.”  Sam rubbed his face.

Ever since Azazel’s attempt at the apocalypse, his special children had been major targets for all sides.  It wasn’t just Azazel’s children that had taken on a new level of vulnerability though; it was all “touched,” as they were known.  Any human that had powers was technically touched, though psychics had been practically removed from the category in order to take advantage of them.  Most psychics were essentially harmless, unable to use their ability to alter reality. But pyrotechnics, telekinetics, teleporters, transfigurors, floramancers, and the dozens of other sorts were considered dangerous by their very nature.

With the exception of Sam, Andy Gallagher, Ava Wilson, and a handful of others, all of the special children had sided with Azazel.  Categorically they’d been deemed abhorrents, a fuzzy term falling between enemy combatants and prey. It was just dumb luck that Sam’s other powers were slow to mature; otherwise he might’ve ended up in the crosshairs with most everyone else.

As far as Sam knew he and Ava were the only special children who hadn’t been hunted, so far.  They’d both managed to pretend to be mere psychics—a rare distinction in its own right, but with only a fraction of the stigma.  He hadn’t seen Ava in three years. After a few jobs had gone wrong she’d been pulled from the field and was probably stuck in some Letters facility ceaselessly writing out intel transcripts.  He hoped that she was still there—that she hadn’t been caught with other powers.

“It’s okay.  You just need to be more careful.”  Dean offered the same unhelpful lesson for the ten-thousandth time before offering Sam a hand up off the floor.  “Did you have trouble sleeping last night? Do you need some food or meds?”

“I didn’t sleep much,” he admitted despite knowing it wasn’t as large a factor as his brother was hoping.

“You’re done for the night,” Dean dictated.  “You can wait in the car while I burn the evidence.”

Sam debated trying to argue that he was still capable of working.  He felt alright; not amazing, but amazing wasn’t really in the cards.  The real problem was that Dean had gotten rattled by his use of telekinesis and would probably be anxious for the rest of the night.  If they did end up doing more hunting it would all be done under the shadow of Dean second-guessing Sam’s decisions and unintentionally patronizing him.  He was concerned. Sam understood why his brother was so controlling and preening; it was just that that knowledge didn’t make it any less annoying.

“I’m done for the night,” Sam agreed.

* * *

“You do your thing,”  Dean said after parking in the motel’s lot.  “I’m gonna check on Cas, take a shower, then maybe go hit a bar.”

“Let me know if you need any help with Cas.”

“You just focus on taking care of yourself.”

Sam nodded subtly as he got out of the car.  He opened up the door to his motel room, tossed the key onto the table, then his leather jacket and gloves onto a chair.  His muscles started to loosen as he let out a long sigh of contentment.

Ruby was lying on the queen bed wearing only a pair of black, lace panties.  She was reading Sam’s battered copy of  _ Paradise Lost _ .  Her eyes caught his, but instead of immediately reacting she got to a stopping point and placed her bookmark.  When his treasured book was safely laid on the nightstand, she beckoned him over with a curl of her finger.

“You look like hell,” she observed.

“You would know.”

He sat down on the bed beside her, then she crawled onto his lap.  Her lips were soft, warm, and tasted of cherry. As they kissed her hands caressed his upper body, discovering all the muscles still coiled from the stress of combat.

“Tough hunt?” she asked while rubbing her cheek lightly against his.

“A few angels.”  Sam rested his head on her shoulder, a bit taken out of the moment.  “I slipped up on my powers during the fight. There weren’t any witnesses, but Dean freaked out.”

“Big surprise.”  She lifted his chin with her hand then kissed him.  “He needs to get laid or something before he explodes.”

“I might explode,” Sam hummed while sliding two of his fingers into her panties.

“I’m counting on it,” Ruby purred, then shoved him down onto the bed.  She smiled slyly at him, then blinked her eyes black. It was a treat she saved just for him—showing herself, her true demonic beauty.  He treasured that measure of trust, to be given such a rare gift in a world such as theirs.

Shortly after fighting back Azazel’s armies the Letters had undertaken one of the largest game changers in the history of the three planes: they’d sealed Hell.  For almost five years Hell had been out of the picture, but that didn’t address the demons that had been left stranded on Earth. It didn’t take long before the hunt was on for the roughly 20,000 trapped demons.  

Ruby had been working with Sam and Dean in opposition to Azazel, but after the loss of Hell things like past deeds were regarded as secondary to things like species.  Initially Dean didn’t have strong feelings about her one way or the other and briefly advocated leaving her to fend for herself, but Sam had stood firm on helping her.

It hadn’t taken long for Sam to fall for her hard.  She was a kindred outlier, his secret haven in the unpleasant mess that had become his life.  He wished that she could join them on hunts like in the old days, but her status as a demon made her even more of a target for persecution than him.  So she wore an anti-detection amulet at all times and tried to stay out of public for the most part. Yet somehow, with everything that had happened over the last few years, she still had a lighter heart than almost anyone they’d met.  And despite her suddenly narrowed existence, she thought about the big picture—Dean called her a schemer, but Sam understood that she was a dreamer.

“Someday we’ll slip away,” she whispered in his ear as she started unbuttoning his shirt.  “We’ll go find a place where there aren’t any hunters or Letters. Where they won’t be able to find us.”

She pressed down on him in a display of her inhuman strength, pinning him harder to the bed.  He lifted his head to kiss her, but she placed a finger to his lips, making him wait patiently.  She stared down at him with those tempting solid black eyes of the Abyss, baiting him.

“Do you miss Hell?” Sam asked wistfully, not bothering to hide his curiosity from her.  As far as he was aware it was the one place besides Heaven that the Letters wouldn't dare venture.  Rationally he knew it was a harsh reality, but as long as it was out of grasp he couldn't help but imagine it as something equally unattainable in its safety.

“You wouldn’t like it there.”  She deftly got to the heart of his actual introspection before kissing his bare chest and nibbling the flesh for good measure.

“How do you know that?”

“It’s Hell,” Ruby replied in almost a chuckle.

Sam smiled at her before reciting a quote that had grown to become a favorite of his over the years. “‘So this is hell.  I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl."  Old wives' tales. There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people.’” Despite his fondness for it, he never shared the quote with anyone besides Ruby, Dean, or Cas, lest his loyalties be called into question.

She gently shoved herself up off of him a bit so that she could look at him skeptically.  “You great philosopher. A tragic figure, trapped in the maw of the machine, prisoner to pragmatic minds with impacted souls.  Tell me your truths about suffering and I will write you a poem so epic as to rival your Paradise Lost.”

“You don’t have to troll me that hard.”  Sam pouted in a caricature.

“And have us both miss out on this wonderful torment?”  She snapped her teeth at him, which made him harder, then spoke in a sultry purr.  “Don’t you know better than to entice a demon with such tender quarry?” She bit his chest harder and he groaned.  Grinding against his crotch, she moved up to breathe warmly in his ear. “Talk dirty to me, philosophy boy.”

“‘Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one”—he inhaled sharply as she scratched his abs—“and never hurts quite enough.’”

She finally leaned in and kissed him.  It was frantic, desperate, passionate, profound.  It was exactly what he needed and it was agony to not just grab her and strip off her panties right then.  That want, that desire, that anticipation—it was nearly hope and it made him feel more alive than anything.  

“I’m gonna fuck you until you pass out from sheer exhaustion and then we’re gonna start your Sisyphean task anew,” Ruby dictated as she grabbed a pile of leather straps from the nightstand.  She tied one of the straps over his eyes and began tying his wrists to the headboard. “No peeking. No powers. Safe word is sage.”

* * *

Sam was clinging to Ruby’s midsection as he slept when there was a knock on the door.  He groaned at the rude awakening and buried his face in her breasts.

“Cover up,” Dean announced, then unlocked the door, but the handle refused to rotate.  “Sam, stop fooling around.”

“Ten minutes,” Sam shouted back.

“No, we need to talk.  Now.”

Sam pulled up the bed sheet to cover Ruby’s and his naked bodies before releasing his telekinetic hold on the doorknob.  

Dean walked in with a to-go container holding two cups of coffee.  He kicked the door shut behind himself, then deposited the coffee on the nightstand closest to Sam.  Thankfully he didn’t bother scolding Sam for holding the door; it was a practically invisible use of his powers and hardly worth bickering over before being caffeinated.

“Did you pick anything up over the night?”

“No visions,” Sam replied as he handed off a coffee to Ruby, who was only barely hiding her chest with the sheet.  “What’s up?”

“Sphinx and Oliver died last night.”  Dean’s tone was professional detachment.  “Apparently Sphinx caught a vision of something out near some trainyard two states over.  It had to be something big because they didn’t even have time to finish the call in before they got made.  They died on the phone.”

“Sphinx, she had a vision?”  Sam furrowed his brow. It wasn’t uncommon for visions to be incomplete stories and for that lack of information to lead to problems, but they must’ve been blindsided if they hadn’t even gotten off the call to Letters.

“Yeah, that part got confirmed on the call before they bit it.  You sure you didn’t get any glimpses of it?”

Sam nodded, then picked up the other coffee cup for himself and took a sip.  Knowing Dean he wouldn’t be satisfied with an answer until caffeine had actually been consumed.  He nodded again to reaffirm his stance.

“We can only catch glimpses of each other’s visions if we’re really close together.”  Sam pursed his lips. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen her.”

“Yeah, well.  However many of you are left should meet up more often so we get some redundancy,” Dean suggested.

“I don’t like hanging out with them,” Sam muttered.  “Psychics are freaks.”

“You think you’re cute, don’t you?”  Dean leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.

“You are,” Ruby whispered to Sam.

“Anyway, it’d be nice to know what was so important that it got those two killed.”  Dean looked at his brother pointedly. “So I don’t care if you don’t want to get a drink with the rest of the class, you need to bite the bullet and make the calls.”

“Seven.”  Sam sighed.

“Excuse me?”

“With Sphinx dead, there are only seven of us left in the field.”

Dean and Ruby both stared at him with expressions of concern.  He wasn’t surprised that nobody else seemed to keep track of the others; he was the one that was actually impacted.  With the number of psychics from the pilot program dwindling, there was a looming threat that it’d be exposed to more scrutiny or terminated entirely.

“The Letters are gonna have you under a microscope if you go back in for a briefing or whatever excuse they come up with,” Dean warned him.  “If we get called to go in, you’re dosing immediately. You can’t be slipping up if they start testing you.”

Sam didn’t really expect the hunters or Letters to be investigating whether he was more than a precog.  Unfortunately, they might very well want to check his performance with the sight and some of their methods were rather stress-inducing.  Ever since being diagnosed, going on to a base always worried him, but facing testing that might actually get him caught was a whole other level of nerves.

“Here,” Ruby told Sam as she dragged her pocket knife along her arm and held the small wound out to him.  “It’s been awhile anyway.”

He licked the bit of blood that was dribbling toward her elbow before sucking from the cut.  

“Do you have to do that in front of me?” Dean groaned while averting his eyes.  It had taken him a long time to come around to the practical benefits of the act, but the sight of his little brother drinking blood straight from the source still had a way of making him queasy.  “I bought you that damn flask for a reason.”

Sam took his mouth off her flesh, then licked his lips before shrugging apologetically.  “Sorry. The fresher it is the more control it gives me.”

“Fine, drink up.”  Dean conceded the necessity, but turned to stare at a drab still-life on the wall.  “I need you solid on your powers. Then you’re calling around to see if anyone knows anything about what Sphinx saw.”

“How’s Cas?” Ruby asked Dean while she ran her fingers through Sam’s hair, gently petting him as he took another taste from her arm.

“I think he could hear me.  He didn’t open his eyes, but I could see them moving when I talked to him.”  Dean’s voice had its usual forced optimism, though his shoulders slumped after a few seconds.  “We need him on his feet if shit’s gonna go sideways.”

“I’ll keep on him.  There are worse ways to spend my day than giving him the play-by-play for our soaps.”  Ruby grinned. “I swear yesterday he nearly blushed when I narrated a sex scene.”

“If it gets him moving then by all means narrate some porn,” Dean encouraged, then looked at her with more sincerity.  “Thanks.”

“Look at me racking up all these altruistic points,” she told Sam in a playful tone.  

Sam kissed the flesh around the cut before she began bandaging the wound, then the back of her hand.  He grinned playfully at her, then offered another quote to entice her. “‘I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.’”

Ruby leapt onto Sam, pinning him with the blissful combination of her bare thighs and a kiss.

“And those were boobs,” Dean muttered as he turned away from them and headed for the door.  Without looking back he added, “Thirty minutes, and take a shower. I don’t want to spend all day in the car with you smelling like sex.”

* * *

After taking a shower, finishing his coffee, and getting dressed, Sam tried calling the other psychics.  Predictably, all of them sent him straight to voicemail. He’d do the same to them. For all their ability to know what might happen, for the most part they avoided talking in real time to each other.  Occasionally the conversations between psychics would become drawn out, non-linear knots as each one became tripped up parsing increasingly complex potentialities for the remaining discussion. It wasn’t the case in all interactions, but he’d been caught in enough positive feedback loops to learn to avoid that literal headache.  Once he’d left the messages he got down to a little housekeeping.

Until after the inevitable meeting with the Letters over Sphinx’s death there was a fair risk that he’d interact with either hunters or Letters and that meant that he needed to be more cautious than usual.  He took his wallet and pulled out his fake driver’s license and fraudulent credit cards. Technically speaking he wasn’t supposed to have either. The risk of visions while driving constituted a medical prohibition on operating heavy machinery.  He personally considered himself a capable driver, but Dean still preferred to have Ruby be backup driver when necessary. 

Dean, Ruby, and Castiel all had their own fraudulent credit cards, but his carried extra annoyances and were a symptom of a greater nuisance.  Thanks to the overblown misperception of what psychics were capable of knowing, they were subject to different legal standards when it came to things like foreseeability or relative bargaining positions.  Specifically in the area of contracts, they were given artificial restrictions in an attempt to level the playing field for non-psychics. Nearly every contract that Sam could enter into was either voidable at will by the other party or just invalid.  Within 48 hours of having his records changed to indicate his status as a psychic his health insurance, car insurance, cell phone coverage, and credit cards had all been terminated. His car had also been immediately repossessed while he was still in the Letters infirmary, not that it mattered since he’d left with his brother in the Impala anyway.

He suspected that there was some paternalistic policy behind destroying the psychics’ right to contract.  To the extent he wanted to stay on the right side of the law he was fairly dependent on Dean, who could legally drive, have credit cards, book motel rooms, or even do something as simple as check out library books.  Most psychics didn’t have someone like him to hover around like some sort of appointed guardian. Those ones were usually wards of the state or beholden to whichever organization agreed to take them on as a project. The idea of actually being dependent on the Letters for all of his funds, shelter, and mobility made him feel a deep pity for his colleagues.

Sam pulled his actual ID card from the bottom of his duffel bag and scowled at it.  The text stating his status as a psychic was a larger font size than his name. Not to mention the damn thing even listed the Letters as his emergency contact.  Reluctantly he put it in his nearly empty wallet, then gave Ruby one last kiss before heading off with Dean.

* * *

“Once Cas is on his feet, we’ll find Ruby a new body and you two can have a little time off,” Dean suggested after getting on the road and putting on some music.

“Letters aren’t gonna give me time off.  Speculating,” Sam replied while looking at a local map on his phone.  “There’s no way they aren’t gonna be strapped for intel with Sphinx dead.  We’ll be lucky if they don’t drag me in for questioning.”

He left unsaid the scenario they were both dreading.  If the Letters decided to end the program for field psychics, then they’d probably try to chain him behind a desk or stick him in a box somewhere to safely write reports.  Normally that wouldn’t have been the end of the world, they both wanted him safe, however without reliable access to demon blood his hidden powers would be at risk of manifesting as he started losing control.  A desk job would inevitably be a death sentence and their only option would be running.

It seemed like every other day he thought about trying to run, but he didn’t like his chances.  The Men of Letters had branches in every country on Earth and had thousands of hunters at their disposal.  On top of that, they had access to sophisticated magical spells and artifacts as well as other psychics. And he was definitely the kind of person that they would chase with every resource they had.  He wasn’t just a touched; he was a Letters-trained, top-tier psychic who was intimate familiarity with their operations. Prospects for retiring to a secluded cabin somewhere to make a life with Ruby weren’t good.

“We’ll find a way of getting you a vacation, even if I have to do a few nights solo.”  Dean offered optimistically.

“You can’t handle one night solo.”

“Cas could cover me.”

Sam didn’t have the heart to suggest that Castiel wasn’t likely to be in fighting shape for a long time.  His suggestions always carried a burdensome sense of inevitably that had a way of killing conversations… granted he hadn’t seen any visions indicating that Castiel would be recovering soon.  That didn’t bode well.

Their resident angel had been unconscious for the last eight days, after a particularly vicious attack by a keena naf.  Castiel hadn’t been in the good graces of Heaven ever since he’d insisted on interfering with Azazel’s invasion of Earth.  All angels, except for Castiel and a few dozen angels, had decided to instead take a wait-and-see approach to the conflict, only jumping into the fight once Hell was vulnerable.  By the time Heaven had declared a holy war, Castiel was already entrenched to the point of not being able to report for official duty. Humans like Sam and Dean might’ve described Castiel and the other earlier angels as vital to preventing the early loss of the war, but Heaven would argue they were premature and undisciplined.  

After the sealing of Hell, Heaven didn’t simply return to its own business.  Thousands of angels began hanging around on Earth. There wasn’t any clear rhyme or reason to the whole thing.  Heaven didn’t bother collecting its stragglers nor did it offer any official response to human governments. They just seemed to not care what their presence meant to the billions of lesser beings trying to regain some semblance of normalcy.  The cat was out of the bag and it tread wherever it willed.

Some of the lingering angels had eventually become nuisances and made it into the ranks of “monsters”.  Rather than being troubled with any interplanar politics or paperwork that might result from those bad apples, Heaven informed all of the angels that had been idling around on Earth that they were officially fallen and unaffiliated with or under the protection of the Holy Host.  The news had come as a shock to the scattered angels, some of whom immediately swore loyalty to human governments while others dove head first into a life of crime. 

Castiel wasn’t so extreme.  He’d worked with the brothers during the war and stuck with that familiarity.  Over the course of five years they’d developed a sincere friendship, to the point that Dean and Ruby no longer seemed anxious about trusting him with Sam’s secret.  Castiel had been their ace in the hole, ready to be pulled out on tough hunts or to help defend them if anyone came snooping around. But for the last week and a day they’d all been strained waiting for him to show some signs of improvement.

Dean had been desperately trying to keep a positive face on; that was half his job.  As they drove to the site of their next assignment he tried to tell jokes and silly stories.  Sam appreciated to effort, but at the same time it was a bit disheartening to have his brother put on an act for him.  Within the greater context his optimism sometimes felt condescending, treating Sam like he was fragile.

They spent most of the day driving around, running down a few leads on a missing person’s case that the local police had referred to the Letters.  Whenever they met witnesses Dean was the only one who bothered flashing his hunter’s license. Sam’s had a stamp of red text warning that he was a psychic across his, so he tried to avoid showing it whenever possible.  Civilians always got unpredictable when they thought he might be reading their mind. Though Dean liked to point out that it made identifying guilty parties much easier because nine times out of ten they’d immediately run for it.

For the most part Sam let Dean take the lead on interviews while he walked the crime scenes or examined evidence hoping to catch a proximately related vision.  To whatever extent he could stay out of the memories of civilians or the police the better. It was fairly common for him to become distracted by visions and his moments of silence were hard to explain when he was trying to carry a conversation.  Dean taking the lead also freed him up to check his inbox for responses from the other psychics. Of the ones that had responded to him, the takeaway was that no one seemed to know what Sphinx had been up to. 

Lebron Grier was a man of many words, which was uncharacteristic for a psychic.  In his usual fashion he’d been painfully verbose in order to say he didn’t know anything.  He was a smooth talker who could duck and weave through most problems with well-tailored dialogue.  Sam had no idea how he managed to be so charming that he overcame the fact that his life and all relevant documentation was plastered with the cautionary stamp “psychic.”  At some point Sam would have to ask for some tips… if he could endure listening to Lebron drone on for several hours.

Karl Duka was a psychic that for whatever reason didn’t like his own kind and predictably hadn’t heard anything from Sphinx in over a year.  His aversion went far beyond Sam’s resistance to socializing. Unlike the rest of their ilk, Karl actually enjoyed trying to ID potential psychics.  When Sam or anyone else was brought in to a Letters base to evaluate whether a prisoner had psychic powers, there was a secret understanding that they’d try to get the prisoner released without a diagnosis.  It was impossible to secure their release if the prisoner had already disclosed incriminating information like Sam had when he was found out. In his confusion over what was happening, Sam had recounted to his doctor events that hadn’t happened before a psychic could be brought in to covertly tell him to keep quiet for his own good.  Karl never bothered to give that sort of warning.

Delfina…. He didn’t actually know her last name.  She hadn’t answered, but he wasn’t surprised. She was a bit standoffish.  He couldn’t blame her. There was no doubt in his mind that she’d been forced into working for their department and just like so many of them there was definitely trauma in her past.  She’d always been, not nice to him but not rude either. Rumor was that during her first few days after being captured she’d bitten one of the lab tech’s faces. There were actually several rumors about her, but that was the one Sam found most plausible.  On more than one occasion he’d seen her going about mundane on-base activities while wearing wrist restraints. Despite her tendency to resist Letters while on bases, she did produce quality results in the field—probably to mitigate direct interaction with her keepers.

As far as anyone could tell Madeline Morse was mute and used as few words as possible to communicate.  Her email only contained the word “No.” Sam had a slight fondness for her despite the fact that she was so uncommunicative.  He couldn’t put his finger on why, but he suspected that she was also touched. True or not, the thought that there was another person who might empathize with him made him feel a bit better.

Dean grinned mischievously.  “Have you heard from Radha?”

Radha Shah had joined the Letters psychics a year after Sam.  He’d been stuck on base for his week-long annual mental-physical checkup when she’d been brought in.  The Letters hadn’t bothered asking him to verify that she was psychic; she’d managed to get through four security keypads in her attempt to escape before being subdued.  That was more or less evidence enough to get her diagnosed. Since he was already there, Sam had been tasked with giving her the rundown on her new life. 

She’d been confined to a high security rooms in the infirmary, the kind with two consecutive industrial strength doors—the kind they kept all psychics in for the first few days.  The higher ups decided to send him in to see if he could help calm her down so that they could get on with the recruitment process faster than usual. He’d introduced himself, explained her predicament—their predicament, then provided a shoulder for her to cry on figuratively and literally.  Apparently pleased with the progress he’d made, the Letters in charge left Sam in there with Radha hoping to expedite her reaching a sufficient level of resignation. It had lasted for about 40 hours before abruptly ending on an unexpected note.

One of the side effects of being so close together for so long was that they started catching glimpses of each other’s visions.  It was the first time he had experienced the phenomenon and it was beyond confusing. When they were both tired he started to lose track of whose visions were whose.  Sam was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, Radha sat down next to him and leaned against his side. He wrapped an arm around her in a comforting gesture.  At the same moment they both saw the vision of her leaning in and kissing him. Sam had felt himself blush. They both had looked at each other in awkward embarrassment, then Radha leaned forward and kissed him.  The most confusing part was that he went for it.

A few minutes later they were forcibly separated and dragged in opposite directions.  Radha had been sent to more testing before intake and foundational training with the promise of someday being in the field like Sam.  Meanwhile Sam was disciplined for the lapse in judgment, then run through his last round of medical checkups before being escorted back to Dean.  He’d noted that security had been careful to limit him to areas where there was no chance of bumping into Radha. After finishing training she’d been assigned to the other side of the country and he’d started dating Ruby, so nothing ever came of it, but it was a well known fact among everyone who dealt with the Odin’s Eye that Radha still had a thing for him.

“She doesn’t know anything about Sphinx,” Sam replied in a distinctly uninviting tone.

“She ask you on a date?”  Dean only waited a half second before jokingly adding, “you two would make some cute little psychic babies.”

Sam shot his brother an unamused glare.  The joke had been made multiple times, but he’d never found it remotely funny, even before dating Ruby.  Beyond the discomfort with how things had gone down with Radha, there was another source of awkwardness. No one knew if being a psychic or touched was genetic and Sam wasn’t sure he’d like to find out.  It was hard enough to exist in the world, he didn’t like the idea of sacrificing any more of his family to it. With everything else society had taken away from him, taking away a hypothetical child seemed like a given.

“If you aren’t interested, I wouldn’t mind you putting in a good word for me—“

“She isn’t gonna fuck you,” Sam stated while flipping through emails on his phone.

“Speculating?”

“Pretty damn certain.”

“Buzzkill,” Dean muttered.  “You know next time we hit a base I’m gonna—“

“No—shh.”  

Sam started to hold up his hand to silence his brother, but stopped part way through and gripped the edge of the seat instead.  A powerful vision engulfed him and largely drowned out his surroundings. It was so strong that he could even smell the blood on the breath of the vampires.  When the vision faded, the Impala was stopped on the side of the road and Dean was staring at him anxiously.

“You okay?  You need to lie down?”

“I’m okay.”  Sam touched his head, then checked his eyes for either ruptured blood vessels or solid black in the side view mirror.  “I saw some vamps, three of them. They’re squatting on the edge of town. Looks like they’ve fed recently.”

It took several minutes before Dean was convinced that Sam was in good enough shape for them to go check out the vampire nest.  Full sensory visions while conscious weren’t unheard of, but they didn’t happen enough for Dean to treat them with the same indifference that Sam did.  All throughout the drive Dean was sneaking glances to make sure things were alright.

They parked a block away from the target building, then grabbed a pair of machetes from the trunk.  When they started crossing the street Sam felt the normal dizzying sensation of deja vu that routinely came with walking through the scene of a vision, which began replaying before his eyes.  The streetlight to the left flickered. The wind rustled the scraps of tarp caught on the chain link fence. Dean accidentally kicked a small rock, breaking the silence.

But something felt off.  Sam’s head started spinning as he tried to understand what was happening.  One of the upstairs windows was dark when it should’ve been illuminated. The vision he was seeing was deviating from reality.  It had a strange sensation to it, nearly foreign. There was too much pressure, force. He couldn’t figure out where the intuition came from, but it felt like something was watching him, something with dark eyes.

“Wait,” Sam groaned as he hunched forward.  “Something’s…” Blood dripped from his mouth and nose.  “...wrong.”

Dean’s eyes widened in horror as he grabbed him and started helping him back to the Impala.  They’d barely made it a few feet before someone started shooting at them. Dean shoved Sam toward the cover of a building’s stoop, then ran after him, kicking in the front door of the dilapidated apartment building.  As soon as they were both inside, Dean slammed the door behind them and started looking around at the entryway for threats or obvious exits.

The building appeared to have been in a fire some time ago.  The wall above three doorways on the left had been charred black.  Everything was dim grey smoke damage and rotting wood. They’d barely had a chance to look at the exterior of the building before taking cover in it, so it wasn’t obvious if there were patios on either side to flee through.  Nearly worse than the unknown layout was the fact that the two of them were only armed with machetes versus at least one semi-automatic.

“A little help,” Dean said as he paced the entryway trying to figure out what to do.

Sam closed his eyes and held out his hand.  A cascade of images flickered in his mind ready to be parsed, but he barely had time to sort them.  The second door on the right. Dark eyes watching him. Through an abandoned apartment. Don’t go through the kitchen and out the back door.  A gunman would be approaching the back door. First bedroom would be clear. Out the far window. Into the neighbor’s yard. Over the fence. Dark eyes watching him, pressing on him.  Across the street—dodge the truck with the driver using his cell phone.

“This way.”  Sam started guiding Dean to the second door on the right.  When they got inside, he recognized the apartment’s living room, but the rest of the layout was off.  That wasn’t what he’d seen. It wasn’t a safe route out. His vision had been wrong. “This isn’t right.”

“What do you mean it isn’t right?” Dean asked.  “What the fuck’s going on?”

The sounds of footsteps entering the entryway made Dean let go of Sam and take position by the door with his machete at the ready.

“Sammy, need you to do something real fast,” Dean whispered tensely.

“One sec.”

Sam focused harder than before, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.  Through all the questionable images he saw a woman with auburn skin and dark eyes.  She was pressing upon him, invading his thoughts. She was feeding him false visions.  With a painful burst of effort he pushed back at her, forcing her from his head. 

He wanted to lie down and pass out, but they still needed to get out of that jam.  Bracing himself against Dean’s shoulder, he took in his surroundings with an unobstructed mind.

There were eight people in light body armor with assault rifles.  Four approaching the apartment door. Two at the windows. Two at the kitchen’s back door.  The apartment was surrounded. After a five count the attackers would breach, throw in smoke grenades, then enter with weapons drawn.  The two of them couldn’t stay there and the exits were covered

“Follow me.  Don’t stop running,” Sam told Dean.

“Running?”  Dean had barely had a chance to confirm that the apartment they were in was too small to run in when he saw Sam raise his hand at one of the living room walls.  “Shit—“

It’d been so long since Sam had used the full force of his powers that he wasn’t even sure what he was capable of.  Dean, Ruby, Cas, and he had been so scared of him being caught for so long that anything more than floating a book was taboo.  But in that moment survival meant taking off all the restraint that he normally exercised in every second of his life. They needed an exit, so he would make one.

Drywall crumbled and wooden studs splintered before them.  Squinting and covering his face to protect himself Sam ran straight for the irregular six foot diameter hole that he’d punched through the living room wall into an adjacent bedroom.  He didn’t stop running for a second. The moment his first foot hit the carpet of the bedroom he threw his other hand forward knocking another massive hole in the next wall. 

He didn’t bother heading towards the closest exterior wall, that quick exit would place them in view of at least two of the shooters.  Instead he was cutting a path from the front to back of the building, straight through three adjacent apartments. 

When he glanced over his shoulder for a split second to make sure Dean was keeping up, he noticed the ceiling behind them sagging.  He was blowing massive holes in load-bearing walls. With a last good thrust, he knocked a hole through the back wall of the building.  The dilapidated apartment complex shuttered and groaned at the damage he’d just inflicted on the half that wasn’t fire-damaged. As soon as he and Dean were clear Sam reached out and pulled the frail structure down on the four attackers who had started chasing them through the holes.

Dean pulled Sam back as the three story building collapsed, sending dust and debris in all directions.  They both coughed and gasped as they stumbled a few yards to get clean air. A small explosion boomed inside the ruins of the building, possibly a grenade or something on one of the attackers.  Despite taking out half their pursuers while putting a pile of rubble between them and the remainder, they’d also managed to end up even farther away from their car. Sam clutched his head for a few seconds, then wiped some blood from his face.

“Run to the end of the block, count to 50, then run and get the Impala.  I’ll meet you three blocks west and two blocks south of here in ten minutes,” Sam instructed before he turned and ran in the opposite direction.

He made his way to be in earshot of the remaining shooters, intentional letting them hear his footsteps.  Just before the four shooters turned onto the street that he was on, Sam pressed himself into an alcove. As soon as he was hidden, he immediately used his telekinesis to break a window and slammed a door down a perpendicular alleyway.  He held his breath waiting to see if they’d take the bait—those precious seconds of foresight hadn’t been kind enough to come to him. The sound of footsteps hurrying down the alley told him that it was an at least partially successful feign, but he didn’t dare come out of hiding until he saw a vision of the four of them searching the decoy building.

Waiting for the vision meant that it took him slightly longer than he’d expected to make his way to the meetup spot, but thankfully it wasn’t so long that Dean had taken matters into his own hands.  Dean was waiting for him and they took off the second Sam was inside the Impala. While driving recklessly fast towards the closest freeway onramp, Dean grabbed a spare shirt off the back seat and held it to his brother’s bloody face.  Sam took it from him, swatting his hand away.

“I’ve got it,” Sam muttered.  He pressed the cloth to his nostrils, then tried to wipe up what was undoubtedly a gruesome scene all over his lower face.  His shirt certainly looked like it had seen better days.

“Are you hurt?”  Dean’s voice was frantic and his body was half-turned, ready to help apply pressure to any gunshot wounds.  “Do you need—“

“It’s just from the strain.  They didn’t get me.” Sam weakly reached up to pull down the sun visor mirror and check his eyes.  Black had expanded out from his pupils to cover his irises. “Shit.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll just drive until it stops.”  Dean tried to reassure him despite the jitteriness in his voice and movement.  He was clearly shaken up—understandably so.

Something had gone very wrong very fast and it wasn’t clear if or how much fallout there’d be.  But if there was gonna be hell to pay, Sam knew the first thing he needed to do. He pulled out his cell phone and called Ruby.

“Stop what you’re doing and get Cas ready to move.  We’re changing motels,” he told her as soon as she answered.

“Are you alright?” 

“We aren’t hurt.  I think someone gave me fake visions,” Sam told her and paused a beat to watch Dean grimly process the news.  “We got ambushed. It was a trap.”

“Are you two being followed?”

He checked the mirrors for other cars, but all he saw was darkness from the overcast night.  “I don’t think so.”

“I can move Cas myself,” Ruby offered.  “You two stay at another motel tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow with the name of our new place.  And watch your ass. If they got in your head they know who you are.”

“They might know what I am,” Sam added.  

He’d meant that they knew he was psychic, but he couldn’t deny the fear that maybe the person that had gotten into his head had observed him using telekinesis.  The only other time he’d experienced anything close to that was when he’d shared visions with the other psychics and that had required them to be within a few dozen yards of each other.  But he was pretty sure that there wasn’t another psychic around; she hadn’t been in any of his visions for the area even after shaking off the false information. So maybe she’d found a way to get in his head from a longer range.  That possibility was both more and less terrifying. At least he’d pushed her from his mind before using his telekinesis.

“If they come after you again call me.”  Ruby’s voice had a sincere concern that made his stomach knot.  “I’ll come for you, no matter what.”

He wanted to tell her that he loved her, but with his brother sitting right next to him he hesitated to venture into that new territory.  “Be careful.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

* * *

They stopped at a gas station to clean themselves up in the bathroom, which was accessible from the outside.  The last thing they needed was some good samaritan calling 911 about two men driving around covered in blood. Sam couldn’t go inside the convenience store since his eyes hadn’t yet returned to normal.  Though it wasn’t nearly as bad as earlier, if anything it looked like his pupils were extremely dilated. After washing up, he sat in the car, checking for any news on the ambush and subsequent building collapse while Dean bought some water.  There hadn’t been any news on the Letters’ feeds and according to the police channels the building collapse and fire was being attributed to squatters. Hopefully the story would only change to an illegal arms deal gone bad when the four bodies with semi-automatic weapons were eventually located.

“You have enough blood?” Dean asked as he handed Sam a bottle of water.  

“I’ll manage.”  He had less than a third of a flask, but he’d have to ration it in order to last until their meetup with Ruby.

“You’re resting tomorrow.  That’s all you’re doing.” Dean’s body was too tense, probably from panic now that the shock was wearing off.  He started up the car and got them back on the road to nowhere in particular. For the moment it was enough to move around a bit more until the heat had died down and Sam’s eyes were back to normal.  “You scared the crap out of me.”

“Next time I’ll give you a warning before we get ambushed,” Sam groaned.  “That was supposed to be sarcastic.”

“I figured,” Dean replied, then shook his head in disbelief.  “You took out half the fucking walls—the fucking building fell down.”

“We got cornered,” Sam said defensively.  “I don’t know what you want from me. I didn’t have time to figure out something subtle.”

“God, somebody had to have seen that.”

“I dropped the building on the ones that might’ve seen what I did—”

“Don’t give me that naive crap.”  Dean huffed. “You aren’t dumb; I don’t care how good you’ve got everyone else fooled.”

Sam scowled at the precision jab.  Two weeks after being diagnosed as a psychic he’d been hit in the head during a test of his reflexes.  He’d been knocked out and his doctors had been very concerned about the effect of blunt force trauma on a brain that was just starting to develop psychic powers.  With psychics being so understudied in general the neurologists weren’t able to discern enough of a baseline to diagnose an injury using objective methods.

When he regained consciousness he cautiously observed the situation rather than trying to be helpful or even resistant.  Two weeks earlier he’d woken up in a similar situation and accidentally said enough incriminating stuff to ruin his entire life.  As far as he could tell there wasn’t any noteworthy damage from the hit to the head, but everyone around him treating him with less fearful hostility because they suspected that he’d suffered some degree of brain damage.  Despite the lack of actual injury, he’d jumped at the opportunity to take some of the pressure off of himself. 

From that point on he intentionally underperformed on all his tests and changed his public speech habits.  He’d found that even with him underperforming in many other metrics, as long as he was able to have visions and perform as an average hunter he was allowed to remain in Odin’s Eye.  It’d been a bit demoralizing to go from being the top scorer on his training exams to placing roughly in the fiftieth percentile, but it lessened the extent to which he was perceived as a threat.  After all, what could any other touched really accomplish that a precog with extraordinary intelligence and combat skills couldn’t?

It was an act, Dean and he both knew it, but at the same time it was problematic.  The whole thing would’ve been easier to deal with except for the ever-present, yet unaddressed tension created by society forcing Sam’s dependency on Dean.  In public they played their parts well, but occasionally too well and the line between performance and reality would blur. It was especially bad when Dean tried to take care of Sam when it wasn’t necessary and in response Sam would resentfully close himself off.  And unfortunately it was a common enough occurrence.

“You aren’t the only one who gets to spit in the face of how hopelessly fucked we are,” Sam countered.

Dean got quiet.  The comment had probably hit the mark a bit, though it was likely that he was also debating whether or not they had to full-on run or if they would take the chance that either the attackers didn’t know Sam was touched or that they wouldn’t turn him in.  Neither of them was morally opposed to running; Sam even fantasized about it sometimes. Unfortunately they were both quite familiar with the track record of others runners’ attempts.

“The others chased you, right?” Dean asked with his telltale hopeful desperation.  “They didn’t try to save the trapped ones from the fire?”

“As far as I know.”  Sam shrugged. “I’d have to go back there to get a read on whether they’re dead.”

“And the ones outside the building didn’t have line of sight on you or the big fucking holes you punched?”

“I think so.”

An uncomfortable silence stretched for several seconds as they both weighed the probability that they were okay with the risk of being mistaken.

“Jesus Christ.”  Dean rubbed his temple.  “Cas needs to wake up fast.  We could really use someone who prays.”

* * *

They’d driven for two more hours when Dean nodded towards a diner at the next off ramp.  “Think we’re okay to stop for some dinner? You need some food. You look completely beat.”

“I haven’t seen anything ominous coming through the feeds, cops or Letters,” Sam commented, then added without looking up from the news on his phone.  “That diner’s bathroom is out of order, if that’s a problem for you.”

“I’ll manage.”  Dean chewed his lip as he replayed Sam’s statement of familiarity.  “So I guess we eat there?”

“We can go somewhere else if you want, but it’s safe,” Sam replied.  “You’d like your burger there.”

“Looks like we have a plan.”

After parking, Sam went inside to grab a table while Dean went to an exterior payphone and began looking through the phone book for the next motel on the list.  Sam sat in the vinyl-lined booth, watching his brother. He didn’t bother looking at the menu; he already knew what he was going to eat. The waitress dropped off some waters and wordlessly offered him some coffee—it seemed Dean’s assessment of his exhausted appearance was accurate.

He put a little cream in his coffee, then looked around the diner.  It was a quaint setting if one overlooked the anti-demon and anti-angel sigils disguised as framed needlepoint mounted around the door.  He wondered if the owners had been victim to some extraplanar encounter or if they were simply part of the fearful masses. Probably the latter, since the television mounted to the wall was set to the 24-hour news station that catered most to that crowd.

The top story was about the campaign manager of some second tier presidential candidates had just been arrested under suspicion of being an unregistered psychic.  Dabbling in the election process when you could either see the future or spy on people was a big no-no. Sam watched a panel of four experts argue over what psychics were capable of—three of them were completely out of their depths.  The fourth wasn’t too far off, but kept conflating clairvoyance with mind reading, which contrary to popular perception wasn’t actually confirmed to exist.

Sam put his hands below the table and removed his leather gloves for the first time all day.  He rubbed the raised tattoo on the back of his right hand. In thick block print it warned “PSYCHIC”.  Psychics under the employ of the Letters were allowed to cover their tattoos at their discretion for their work, but it was mandatory to have one.  His had been inflicted on him only a few hours after being diagnosed. In theory some less-fortunate psychics had to leave theirs exposed. He slipped his gloves back on, then patiently observed the latest stream of visions while waiting.  

In his fatigue Sam had missed the fact that Dean had entered the diner and sat down across from him.  He was shaken from his distraction to find his brother staring right at him with an unamused expression on his face.  Dean knew what had happened; on several occasions he’d seen Sam worn thin to the point of obliviousness.

“The waitress came while you were doing your thing.  I ordered you a salad,” Dean informed him. “It creeps out servers when you just stare at nothing.”

“Just tap me to get my attention.”

“That doesn’t really make them feel much better.  Most people notice when you wave a hand in front of their face.”

“I could close my eyes next time,” Sam suggested.  He felt like closing his eyes and taking a nap right there, but some food always helped when he was spent on powers and without Ruby’s blood.

“Yeah, sleeping while sitting straight up.  That’s subtle,” Dean countered. “You should slouch more.  You’re so uptight you look like Cas half the time.”

“Noted,” Sam replied in a distinctly rigid tone, earning a half eye roll.

“I know things just went a little weird, but we’ll get this straightened out.”  Dean leaned forward and lowered his voice. Now that he’d had some time to calm down he was back to his unjustifiably-optimistic self.  “The police think the fire was some homeless people. We’ll throw together a skeleton of a report, then we’ll get you some rest—like a real break.  You and Ruby can go fuck on a beach somewhere until you can get your visions under control.”

“They aren’t out of control.”

“You saw the wrong stuff.”

“Something was done to me.”

“Fine whatever, someone laid a whammy on you.  Did they overpowered you or what?” Dean waited a second for Sam to respond, but he didn’t know what to say in response to his shortcoming.  “You need to recover or get stronger or whatever it is you people do. We can’t have you guiding us around based on things that aren’t true. I need you to get it together.”

“I know.”

“If you can get this under control, you and Ruby—“

“Ruby isn’t just some treat that you can dangle in front of me,” Sam quietly snapped at him.  “She’s my fucking girlfriend. She part of our team. She isn’t just a bag of blood or someone for me to fuck when you need me to cheer up.”

“I’m not trying to use her as bait or a bribe for good behavior.”  Dean rubbed his face in exasperation and maybe a little embarrassment.  

“She could help us in the field more,” Sam said meekly.

“Do you want to get caught?  You fucking want to run? Are you finally ready to do it?  Because having the two of you out and about together is asking for the fucking alarms to ring,” Dean nearly hissed.  He closed his eyes in something between a grimace and a sigh, then buried his face in his hands. After a long pause he looked up with softer expression.  “I want you to be happy. You know that if I could get you out I would. But for now all I can do is to try and help you get a weekend alone with someone that actually makes you smile.”

Any more of the painfully serious conversation was quelled by the waitress walking over and dropping off their meals.  Dean started eating his burger immediately, signaling that he didn’t want to continue talking about that road to destruction or the stopgap measure that had somehow become the best part of Sam’s life.  In a way, on a personal self-interest level, that really was what he lived for, his moments of happiness were when he could be himself in secret with Ruby.

Sam picked at his salad as he watched a couple with two young children sitting in a booth on the other side of the diner.  The older child was blowing bubbles in her glass of chocolate milk. The mother laughed as she held her infant son. He felt a dull ache in his chest at the sight of them.  In that moment, more than anything he wished that he could bury himself in Ruby’s embrace. Maybe they couldn’t have that, but someday maybe her wistful dreams would come true and they’d at least be able to find a place to live in their own sort of peace.

Dean turned in the booth to glance over his shoulder at what had caught Sam’s attention, then looked back at his brother.

“Are you actually looking at them or are you spacing out?”

“A bit of both,” Sam replied quietly.  “No powers, just thinking.”

Dean cautiously reached out and manually turned Sam’s head to face him.  “Sammy, don’t look at them. You don’t need to do that to yourself.”

After a long pause Sam quietly asked, “you ever feel like we’re fighting for the wrong side?”

Dean’s expression of pity turned to a different sort of pain as his lips thinned and he lost a little color in his face.

“Don’t talk like that; I’m serious.”  He shifted, not entirely comfortable with the turn in the conversation.  “The world isn’t perfect, but we’re protecting people. It’d be different if…”  Dean caught himself before he said anything too encouraging. “There’s no revolution.  There isn’t any other side, not that’s keeping people like them safe. So we’re it, we’re the good guys.”

“I’m not saying we don’t help people…”

Sam wanted to argue that the innocent blood on their hands weighed heavily against their good deeds.  It was rare, but they did occasionally get assigned hunts for people like him, either touched or psychics.  Whenever they’d work those hunts Sam’s visions became “uncooperative” and they both had less wind in their sails, though Dean would eventually get the job done.  They couldn’t just let every touched or psychic go; that would put too much scrutiny on Sam. 

It was easily the part of the job they hated most.  Sam always referred to it as “killing kids” despite the periodic target who was older than them.  It’s just that touched and psychics tended to get caught when they were first manifesting their powers in their late teens or early twenties.  As far as Dean was concerned nobody over fifteen was a kid, except for his twenty-eight year old brother.

“I just wish things were different.”  Sam didn’t have to elaborate. They both knew all the things wrong with his life.

“We take things one at a time and we do the best we can.  That’s how we survive.”

They ate in silence for several minutes.  Every once in awhile Sam would stop as a new set of images and sounds refreshed in his head, washing out old possibilities.  He was used to the routine, so it didn’t bother him as such, but it did take a bit of attentiveness to watch for anything that might be a threat or actionable intelligence.  Each time Dean would watch him with an unenthusiastic anticipation of having to react to some development, though thankfully nothing exciting was festering in their periphery.

Halfway through his salad, a wave of dizziness hit Sam and the image on the television distorted briefly.  No one aside from him noticed the fleeting interference, but that could quickly change if it continued.

“I’m not feeling well,” Sam said pointedly, earning an eye flick of worried acknowledgment.

“Alright, I’ll get the waitress to pack this up.  You go lie down in the back seat.”

Sam dug through his wallet and pulled out $30, then put it on the table as he got up.

“They’re cash only.”  He pointed to a sign on the wall behind the counter.

* * *

Sam curled up as best he could in the back seat of the Impala.  He’d have to spend a night without Ruby—he’d done it many times before, but in the last four years those nights had usually been spent tossing and turning on a Letters infirmary bed.  Without her it would certainly be a long night yielding little rest.

He missed dreaming, pure imaginative dreams.  Nowadays it was either merciful nothingness or snippets of reality or potentialities.  Some nights it was chaotic torrents of images and sounds, things he couldn’t parse enough to care about.  Other times it was fully formed, high-definition sight, sounds, taste, and smell. Those were the worst, when he couldn’t even escape the world through unconsciousness.  The mornings after he’d always wake up exhausted.

When they were back on the road fatigue overtook him, only to be met by one of those vivid scenes.  He considered trying to force himself out of it, to wake himself up, but then he recognized the story’s protagonist.

Debora Arkin was only a few years older than him, but she’d presented as a psychic when she was only fourteen years old.  She’d been a veteran of their sort back when Sam had first been diagnosed and more or less forced into the program. He’d met her early in his career and found her to be a sort of role model.  She was the one who had told him how to evaluate whether or not new psychics were presenting in an ambiguous enough way so that he might help them avoid diagnosis. Supposedly she’d gotten half a dozen psychics out of the Letters infirmary without tattoos.  Sam had only succeeded once.

In the vision, she was with her partner—some man with an evidently forgettable name.  They were cautiously walking through a dark, abandoned night club or bar. The two of them were armed with silver knives and flashlights as they were checking under the dust-covered tables for something that they hadn’t found.  Debora held out her hand, trying to sense what she was looking for, but frowned.

Sam could feel that something was off.  People were watching Debora and her partner, both in person and from far away.  He recognized the sensation. The woman who had tampered with his visions was watching, probably interfering with Debora’s visions.  There were other people watching too, people who were there. It was a trap.

“Run,” Sam instinctively called out to her.

Debora looked around.  “Did you hear that?”

“What?” her partner asked.

“Run!” Sam shouted more forcefully, desperately.

“Sam?“  She’d barely breathed the absurd question when the shadows behind her let loose a barrage of gunfire.  

The Impala lurched violently, then swerved as Dean tried to avoid spinning out.  The tires screeched and one burst from the strain. 

“Fuck!” Dean yelled as he pulled off to the side of the road into a field.  Once they were stopped he turned around to look at Sam who was still lying in the back seat.  “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Don’t move.”

Sam sat up and quietly watched as Dean got out of the car without explanation—he already knew what his brother was about to do.  Dean grabbed a metal baseball bat from the trunk, then began repeatedly hitting a wooden fence post that was several yards in front of the car with it.  After the tenth strike, he dropped the bat and screamed in frustration. For a moment his legs trembled, but he wasn’t actually going to collapse. Dean picked up the bat, returned it to the trunk, then got back in the driver’s seat.

“I’m sorry.”  Sam spoke softly.  “It was an—“

“Accident.”  Dean finished for him, then muttered.  “Everything’s a fucking accident…. Call Ruby, as soon as Cas is in a safe place she’s popping over here and giving you a fix.”

“I had a vision.”

“No shit—I fucking hope so with a kick like that.”  Dean leaned his forehead against the steering wheel before silently mouthing a count to ten.  “I know you don’t mean for that stuff to happen. I’m sorry you had to see that.” He gestured toward the fence post.  “I’m sorry I yelled.”

Sam wanted to reassure Dean that he understood and it was okay.  They’d both been under a huge amount of stress for so long. Sometimes his brother let his tension escape in bursts of rage, but Dean wasn’t actually angry at him—Sam wanted things to be different more than anybody.  He wanted to let Dean know he was forgiven, but honestly he was so tired of having that same conversation over and over again. It was routine and fast approaching trite.

“I saw Debora and her partner get shot in the backs at some dive bar.  The place was abandoned and the shooting was semi-automatic.” Sam paused for a moment to give Dean a chance to fit together the unpleasant pieces.  “Sphinx and Oliver were gunned down, weren’t they?”

“Yeah,” Dean confirmed.  “You think they walked into a trap like us?  Gave them false visions like what got done to you?”

“Someone’s killing Letters’ psychics.”  Sam rubbed the back of his right hand. “Speculating.”


End file.
